Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

The UMIC Workshop on Future Mobile Applications (UMICWS)
UNICWS was held on 26 February 2010 at the UMIC Research Centre. It was jointly
organized by the Chair of Information Systems & Databases (Informatik 5) and the
Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT). It provided a forum for
academics and practitioners to share knowledge and experience, explore future scenarios,
directions and application domains of innovative research, and discuss the challenges and
solutions for developing new mobile systems and applications. Over researchers from UMIC
and other institutions participated in the workshop, including some from the German
Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and from the Dutch Open. Prototypes
were presented, and there were lively discussion on the presented research findings. The event
helped establish a research community across universities and research institutions, for further
knowledge sharing and long-term collaboration.
UMIC Guest Lecture
On 29 January, Dr. Russel Hainen, from the Toshiba Research Labs Europe (TRL), gave a
guest lecture entitled ‘Formal Methods and Femto-cells’.
TRL in Bristol is at the forefront of research into wireless telecommunications and plays a
leading role in numerous global standards and projects in the industry. Dr. Haines is TRL’s
Chief Standardisation Officer. He presented an overview of the lab and some of the work that
goes on there, with particular focus on the new hot topics of femto-cells and self-organising
networks. He also talked about some of his recent and ongoing research in this area, including
the use of formal methods in reconfigurable devices.
UMIC Distinguished Lecture
This year’s Distinguished Lecture was given on 1 February by Prof. Dr. Giovanni de Micheli
of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Prof. de Micheli is Director of the
Institute of Electrical Engineering and of the Integrated Systems Centre at EPFL. His
presentation was entitled ‘System-Level Design Technologies for Heterogeneous Embedded
Systems’.
He discussed how smart micro/nano systems will foster a
revolution in health and environmental management,
with the final objective of improving security and quality
of life. At the same time, he argued, they will create a
large market of components and systems, and a renewed
perspective for electronic design and manufacturing
companies. Such systems will be the fundamental
building blocks of wearable and ambient systems, to
gather and integrate heterogeneous data in real time and
to operate and communicate in a wireless and ultra low power mode. According to Prof. de
Micheli, the design of these systems will be enabled by the hybridization of manufacturing
technologies which enables us to attain unprecedented levels performance as well as to
integrate electronic and fluidic circuits with sensors and actuators. To accomplish this
ambitious goal, new technologies and architectures must be matched and tailored to the
operational environment by solving novel an challenging design and optimization problems,
through the creation of novel design methodologies and tools. These aspects are studied
(among many others) at the Swiss federal program ‘Nano-Tera.ch’ that is lead by Prof. de
Micheli.
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